


stranger and stranger

by scullay



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asian Stephen Strange, Descriptions of war, and was a human being with feelings and emotions and history, if stephen strange was born to asian parents, in nebraska
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 14:31:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19402261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullay/pseuds/scullay
Summary: if stephen strange was born stephen wu in nowhere nebraska, and taught from a tender age that violence and medicine both brought pain, and that it was worth it.or, if doctor strange was asian.





	stranger and stranger

he is born stephen wu, because the nurse in small town nebraska can’t spell the name his mother and father gave him. it’s the first prejudice against him, and he will never know until much later in life, when his father finally admits that stephen was never the name they had in mind for him. they won’t tell him the name they promised him in the womb, though. it won’t matter by then, anyway. 

he grows up picked on and bullied and shoved and kicked and pushed because he is weird. donna (not her name. never meant to be her name) would always try her best to stand in front of the bullies, the oppressors, the mighty hand that shoved and shoved and shoved until the air in stephen’s lungs felt useless and moot. but donna never stopped trying. two years younger and she will always be stronger and braver than him.

it’s the hit against victor that finally pushes stephen over the edge. there is no donna to save him, no parent to praise, no teacher to condemn. victor is young, he’s still in elementary school when he’s targeted for being related to sixteen year old stephen. he’s _victor_ in a mock-chinese accent, too weird and slanted eyed and _young_ to fight back. he’s a better target than donna or stephen. victor doesn’t fight back. he hasn’t even learned to yet.

stephen snaps. he punches with his fist, knuckles already bleeding. victor is crying, weeping, but stephen snaps and punches and the bully goes down like a sack of potatoes. and stephen knows what a hard sack of potatoes feels like. he carts them around every day after school and every morning before the wobbly truck ride to school, all his siblings tucked away inside. the boy goes down like dropped potatoes, and stephen doesn’t relent.

he whales on them. he punches and kicks and bites and snaps and donna will tell him later how scary he looked. how breathtakingly cruel he looked between each strike and dodge and inevitably punch back. he won’t tell her how good it felt. to let it all out. to tear them apart while victor cried and cried and nursed his skinned knee.

they don’t expel him. he’s one of three asian kids in the small combined school in nowhere nebraska. but they tell him, “place your anger somewhere else, stephen. use your rage for something good,” and it won’t matter if he tells them this is the first time he’s ever physically hurt someone. he doesn’t remind them of all the times his tormentors beat on him and never received such warnings like this.

but it gives him an idea. victor’s skinned knee and his own bloody fists give him an idea.

on his eighteenth birthday, he tells his farm-worked parents he’s going to join the army. his mother cries, weeping into her calloused, used hands. his father stares at him, boring his dark eyes into stephen like it’s supposed to mean something more. maybe it did, in another world. maybe his father called him by his true, invisible name and stephen stayed.

but stephen has no attachments to names here. 

donna pulls his ear lobe and hisses, “you die, and i’ll kill you. you’re leaving this to me, stephen, so you better do something for it.” and this time, for the first time, he wants to cry. 

victor is little, but he knows what going away means. he knows what war means. he knows what his big sister’s dark, haunted look means. it means victor pushes his shoulders back, fists his tiny soft hands and meets stephen’s stare dead on. he only cries a little. he pushes a tiny coin into stephen’s hand and says, “don’t waste it.”

(he puts it back into victor's sock of coins before he leaves. tucks a couple twenties in there too.)

on the train to kansas, stephen reads a book he stole from the library. it’s all about the human body and connecting nerves to nerves, cells to cells, sinew to sinew, bone to bone. his fists are bruised from his last ever fight in nebraska, and when he flips the pages, he begins to learn what each bone in his hand means.

it takes him a long time to start a reputation as stephen strange, m.d. he joins the army young, builds a reputation as hardcore henry, and is almost booted a dozen times before someone sees the brightness in his eyes. he is launched across the globe and told to hold a gun and fire whenever he chose fit. the sand and heat is familiar, but he does not think too long of whose faces he sees in the children huddling under broken buildings to hide from him.

he patches up major general mulford in a rain-soaked, bloody lot outside a town he can’t pronounce with mandarin and accented english in his mouth. he’s twenty-three but feels a hundred times older. his hands are steady as he unofficially saves the life of his commanding officer outside a war zone flecked and dotted with hand grenades, r.p.gs, shrapnel and cloying blood-stench. 

stephen works. mulford screams. he pulls threadbare cloth around a gushing red wound and ignores the pained kicks and wrenches the major general levels in his direction as he tightens and tightens the wound. he sanitizes with fire and burns the wound to a stop. he works quick and ruthless and when he’s done, major general mulford breathing heavily around the rain and blood, queasily mutters, “you’re one strange kid.”

so he goes to school. his hands never become soft again. he clenches pencils too hard, answers questions too quick, stitches so beautifully his teachers wonder how he served brutally in the war. he comes home to los angeles and trains himself the way he taught himself in school. he learns. 

by the time he’s thirty-one, he’s a doctor. he takes some time off and goes back to war. his hands are steadier than they used to be, keener then they were before. he comes back to war with intent and need and will, and they show him all the rosy bursts of red and wounds and sickly infestation he must heal, and he does. 

(his mother phones to congratulate him on becoming a doctor. he tells her, _no, not officially,_ but she won’t take no for an answer. she says she knows. she says she can feel it in the air around her that her son is a doctor. her voice cracks a little when she says it.)

he’s doctor stephen strange to his colleagues when the shell goes off. he’s driving. he’ll always blame himself a little for that. the rest of the men and women in that truck knew the risks of death. they knew what war was. they knew what driving through an apparently dead minefield meant. but he was doctor strange. he had the feather reflex touch that should’ve saved them all.

in the end, one inch brush of the wheel to the shell underground caused seven deaths, and the loss of his hands. not utter loss. as he screams around the fire and blood and sand and burning, scrambling to find anyone, anything, he’ll know at some deep, doctorate level inside him that his hands are not _gone_. they’re just so mutilated and paralyzed that he thinks, _even i can’t fix this_.

(but that never stopped stephen wu from trying.)

donna is lounging in the chair next to his bed when he wakes. she is paler than before, and he wonders if she’s moved off the farm as soon as she turned eighteen too. her hair is long and straight and her nose is still pudgy and porky and her nails are sharp, weapons, and when he groans awake, she looks up as if she already knew.

“idiot,” she hisses and stephen doesn’t want to cry. he doesn’t want to look at his hands. but he flexes. god, he flexes. but he can’t move them, not even an inch. they rest at his lap, bandaged and wired. he counts the wires, the attachments to his bones, his nerves, his cells. he tries hard to flex, but tears squeeze out instead of movement.

donna tightens her eyes shut, and he wonders if he’s ever seen her cry. he can’t think of a single time.

“i—i can’t—“

she says nothing while he gapes for words. he won’t find any that fit. he won’t find words that fit for a long, long time.

in the end, it’s his mother that whispers to him. it’s been a year and stephen is not obsessed. he is horrified and wracked with guilt and wishes beyond a doubt that he could go back in time and help. his hands hurt, every movement bringing him unrelenting pain that almost reminds him of when he was a teenager, hands bruised and blistered with vengeance.

he can’t even help with the field. he screams raggedly into the vast lines of corn and somewhere, his father’s ghost gently looks at him with dark boring eyes that have to mean something, have to make him understand something, but stephen was never good with the looks his father meant for him. so he screams into the fields, nerves aching and bruised, and his mother finds him on the ground.

she speaks in mandarin, and maybe this is her own small rebellion. she stayed in this town for more than thirty years, after her children all moved away, after she was left to defend the crops on her own, after she was left in this town after her husband died and left her more alone than before. but she stayed. and like stephen, she would never, ever relent.

“i had a dream a year ago. you were in it. your hands were bleeding but you weren’t crying. you were surrounded by gold.”

he breathes deep into the dusty ground, his useless ragged hands shaking in his lap. she settles next to him, her old bones weary but comfortable under the hot scalding sun of summer and the warmth of the earth she raised and bred with love. maybe it’s why her corn was better then the rest. the earth loved her just as much as she loved it.

stephen shakes his head at her, faint and careful. the mandarin words in his own mouth are rusty and a little worn, but he too uses them like some sort of weapon against an unknown enemy. “i don’t care about money. i just want my hands back.”

“they never went away,” she never stops touching him, and the very presence of his mother is as soothing as he knew it would be. no psychology training had to tell him that. “your hands are still here. my son, look.”

but when she goes to touch the back of his hands, he tugs away. “i’m nothing without them.”

for the first time, she hissed out a curse and smacked his shoulder. “bullshit. tell that to your uncle, eh? he has no hands and you don’t see him complaining.”

stephen turns to her with a surprised blanch. “he’s missing _two_ fingers!”

she flapped her hand. “do you remember when i had that dream about your sister? i told you. i remember your voice on the phone. you spoke to me like i was nuts.”

“she’d told you about trying to get pregnant for weeks—“

“she told me nothing. you know your sister. she works a mile a minute and forgets about the world until it’s too late. i told you before she’d told me. i said, boy, you’re going to be an uncle in nine months to a baby girl and she’s going to have your eyes.”

stephen resisted the urge to roll his eyes. he was thirty-two, not twelve. “it was a fifty-fifty chance, ma. we’re asian; we all have dark eyes.”

she clicked her tongue. “why won’t you believe me? my dream about you, son, is true. you want your hands back? you know how to get your hands back.”

they both lingered in the quiet of the field, his shout faded and the birds returning. he thought of weeks ago, when a colleague of his had mentioned his vacation to tibet. he was white, so he spoke of tibet like stephen had been there before, had been born and raised in another country that looked and sounded like him. but he spoke of a person who lived in the mountains that the locals almost worshipped. 

he said people with crippled backs or limps or arthritis gnarled hands had made the laborious climb up the hills and stairs and curving routes to the top of the temple peaked top, and come down cured. stephen’s colleague said this as a joke, with an offhand look at stephen’s braced hands, and stephen had wanted to punch him.

but later, he slowly typed in the name of the town in tibet his ex-colleague had visited. nothing on the website gave him information on the mountain itself, but the articles online spoke of the legends of the person who lived in those mountains. how they’d cure anyone who deserved it.

he looks at his mother, at her weathered face and braided hair and weary knees and steady, calloused hands, and wonders if he could carry her up himself. he knew he was strong enough. he knew he did not need his hands to hold his mother and carry her up to a place that might save her from the deep trenches of the years to come.

as if hearing his thoughts, she reached up and pressed her hand to his cheek. “i love you, son of mine. don’t worry. the earth will treat us right while you go,” she patted the ground beneath them with her other hand, and stephen bent and crookedly leaned against her chest.

she wrapped small arms around his broad back. “i love you,” she said. it finally sounded like he understood what she was saying.

stephen flew back to los angeles and packed a bag. his apartment was modest and windowed and there was a security guard and stephen did not have any feelings as he walked around his home and decided to leave. he packed for a week—no more, no less—and gave his hands a fierce glare before walking out and taking a cab to the airport.

into the wind, he murmured, “make sure she’s okay.” to the ground, he whispered, “make sure they’re all okay.” to the sky above him, he muttered, “please.” and felt like an idiot for doing it. but he did it. he wondered how his squad back in afghanistan would’ve laughed at him. or maybe they were watching him from above, egging him on.

it is not hard to direct himself through the airport, and towards the city of kathmandu. finally, at some tiny, foreign level of him, stephen has no complaints when the elderly man gently shouts at him in tibetan and he calls back in mandarin, and he wonders if his mother would love it here. 

it does not take him a week to find the mountain, or the small town of kamar-taj. all he has to do is ask, and the people of tibet understand him. he asks, “do you know where kamar-taj is?” and they say, “yeah, just over there. better take a bus, though.” and stephen is on his way.

kamar-taj is brilliant in its stone architecture and waving flags and homey air that almost, distantly, reminds him of his own home. the bus drops him a mile away and he walks, enjoying the air and the trees and only has a panic attack once, when he catches a certain smell of the trees and it keels him over, remembering the army. but he gets up. he does not relent.

the mountain is huge, and almost secluded by trees and clouds and more stones embedded into the face of the rock that, when he looks clearer, is actually the outline of a temple. he stands there, awestruck for a moment. he doesn’t realize someone’s approached until he’s asked, in plain english, “are you looking for something?”

he looks down across at the bald asian man, close to his own age, staring back at him. he’s wearing a faded green tunic, his thick hands stuffed into pockets at his hips. he looks at stephen, and he wonders if he exudes some sort of american tell. which was strange, considering he was trained since five to look as unimposing as possible. 

stephen looks at the man and the man looks back and stephen finally says, “i’m looking for the person who lives in that mountain.”

the man doesn’t turn to look. just cocks his head. “why?”

“my hands.” he does not lift them as proof. he’s had enough people look at his scarred, long, braced hands and wonder. he did not like them to wonder. “i want to know if the person who lives there can help me heal them.”

“why?”

stephen lets out a chortle. “because i’d like to go back to performing surgery, at the very least.”

the man looks at him, almost appraising him. stephen feels looked through and into, all his secrets and wants and fears laid out for this man who does not look like someone who takes lies for answers. 

is he lying about surgery? it was the only thing that’s made him feel utterly and completely useful. how many times has he helped someone who the other doctors thought was a dead-end? how many people has he cured, saved, that the other doctors thought weren’t worth it? how many times had stephen had to take a stand and shout to be heard? surgery was not like war. surgery was precise and careful and clean and it _helped_.

stephen wants to help. maybe it’s all he’s ever wanted to do. help those, like his siblings, like his parents, like himself, who couldn’t help themselves. who needed that extra hand to be heard in a crowd of people who did not want to hear them.

he looks back at the man and the man says, “if it’s what you want.”

stephen straightens. “it is.” _more than anything_.

so he takes him up the hill. at first stephen asks who this person is, how they do what they do, if they have some sort of credentials or ability. at first, he asks about the biological details. how can someone with arthritis walk all the way up and walk all the way down, cured? stephen takes the stairs faster than the man, and maybe this is his first lesson.

he stops asking questions by the fifth mile. he is sweating and on the verge of another panic attack, thinking about the very last time he was this hot, and sweaty, and aching, and exercised, and well-used to the stink of sweat and grime and dirt and bl—

he has to stop, hands shaking so hard he can’t wrap them around themselves. the man waits. he does not say anything as stephen sits down, braces his hands on his knees and breathes through his mouth. it takes him shorter this time than the road with the trees, but he gets up all the same. he gets up, takes a sip of his water, and keeps walking.

along the curving hills and steep steps and pathways overshadowed with rotting stone and bright green leaves, are dozens of people. the elderly and young, all making the same climb as him. some limp, some stride, some crawl, faces determined. stephen stops to help a few, his scarred and disfigured hands reaching out to take a hand, a shoulder, an arm, but the man at his side always pulls him back. 

“it’s their climb,” he says, and walks onward. 

the people who come down are fewer and rare. they too are young or elderly, striding or walking, faces the epitome of brightness. they gleam and smile, passing compliments and encouragements to the people around them, but do not stop to help. they walk back down the great mountain, and stephen never sees them again.

by nightfall, he is bone weary and tired. he has to unwrap another jacket from his pack and tighten it to the chin, his hands quavering a little with the zipper. the man seems unperturbed in his tunic and sandals, and keeps a level head around the final columns of towering steps. stephen takes them slowly, conserving his breath in his lungs in a well practiced movement from a time he both wanted to forget, and couldn’t.

finally, with the moon peeking her head over the mountain top, they reach the end of the steep stairs. and there’s the temple. from the ground, it had looked like a painting carved into the side of the mountain face, but being so close to the huge, enormous structure, stephen knows there is no painting to this temple.

the man puts a brief hand on stephen’s shoulder. for the first time, he faintly grins, “she’s waiting for you.”

(stephen, maybe delirious with pain and exhaustion, cannot help thinking of his mother.)

passing through the huge overarching stone pillars, the man leads stephen through a passageway that cuts right into the mountain. the stones are smooth white, the floor is clean marble, the halls are lit with lanterns that sway slightly in the breeze from outdoors. but the man leads stephen further in, hallways going tighter and darker, the mountain overhead bearing down despite the towering ceilings and broad yellow walls.

turns after turns finally leads the pair to another brief set of stairs. they climb slowly, the moment building. the space at the top of the stairs is broad and huge, great lanterns of light spilling across the huge flat space surrounded at intervals by tall brown pillars. people in yellow and coloured robes pass by behind them, the temple depths deepening.

at the centre of the room is a hooded figure sitting patiently before a giant upraised platform. there are candles and bowls of flowers and spices and rice and shiny rocks, pictures of family members, ranging in time eras, and a giant gold disk hung above it all. as stephen and the man respectfully creep forward, the soothing sound of pouring tea echoes throughout the space.

the man beside stephen slightly ducks his head and says, “ancient one, stephen wu has arrived.”

stephen jerks a look at the man. he had never introduced himself. he keeps his emotions level, but he can’t help the slight panic that rips through him as he realizes he is somewhere he has no idea how to get out of.

finally, the figure in the red hood turns around. stephen stays stuck, rapt, as he watches. the hood is not pulled down far enough that he can’t see her face, and he's struck at how young she looks for the oldest person he’s ever seen. for someone named the ancient one, he would’ve imagined a wrinkled, shriveled skeletal figure, but the woman who turns towards him with tiny cups of tea in her hands appears not much older than his own mother.

she is deeply tanned, her eyes narrowed into the folds of her face. she moves slowly, but he doesn’t imagine it’s because her joints ache. she moves with grace, swaddled in the red robe but no less majestic. she stands effortlessly and stands heads shorter than stephen and the man. but there is a sense of towering height to her, her magnitude much more powerful than any politician or general he’s ever encountered.

her smile is faint when she stretches her hand to give him a tiny cup. stephen hesitates but by a single look from the man, gently takes the cup from her.

she speaks in old mandarin, the mandarin his mother and her mother used to speak in when he was little. “you have travelled a great deal for your hands. do you know why?”

he frowns, just the faintest. “do _you_ know why?”

she chuckles, a tinkling noise that sounds like air musically floating through trees. “you’ve travelled on a whim to meet me. you’ve spent money you do not care for to meet me, pushed yourself to mental limits to know me, urged yourself past everything you’ve studied and trained to understand just to make sense of the person at the top of the mountain whose known to cure.”

he can’t help it; he reflexively chuckles. “you do know why. how do you know?”

“do you want to know how i heal, stephen?”

it takes him a moment to answer. he looks sideways at the man beside him, then the vast temple around them, then the hallways past the pillars. does he want to know? or does he want his hands back? ever since stephen was young, he’d always _known_. he’d had to know if it meant he didn’t want to be bullied more. he’d had no problem learning before, but does he want to know now?

he looks back at the woman, her words hanging in the air, and stephen has no right answer. “i would just like my hands back.”

“i can give you your hands back. you’re special, stephen. you are a man who knows so much because he wants to help, just not how. i can teach you how to help people better than you have with scalpels and guns. you’ll get your hands back, and you’ll know the world.”

he looks between them. “do you have a landline?”

he gets his own room. it’s small and contained and has a small window that, if he stands just right, shows him bright morning sun and late evening stars. the sheets are itchy and the pillow is too thin, but stephen has never been more comfortable. he puts his bag underneath his bed and calls his mother.

“i told you,” she whispers, and it sounds like she’s stirring something for lunch, or dinner later. his eyes droop listening to the sounds of his childhood home. he rests against the wall, then slides to a sit as she calls, “what’d i say, huh? my boy’s gonna be a goddamn hero.”

he smiles faintly. “wasn’t i a hero before?”

“you punched other boys in abandoned buildings and put ice on your sister’s dislocated shoulder,” she laughs and he joins her. “you know you’ve always been my hero. now everyone gets to see it.”

he waits for a moment, listening to her curse at something, then smack something, then go back to stirring or chopping or calling to the chickens in the coop. he thinks he could fall asleep here, listening to her be his mother in a world away, still unchanged. he rests his head back and thinks if he has anyone to be thankful for, it will always be her.

“i love you, ma.”

“i love you, son.”

it will be a long while before stephen _gets_ it. that this is not medicine or war; but magic. the thick books in the library are actually helpful spells and hand gestures. he learns about doorways and passageways and slipstreams into realms that he had no idea existed before. _there is dark_ , says the ancient one, _and there is light and you must learn to control both_.

he’s not very good at it, at first. his hands are always shaking, and no matter how hard he massages them or stretches them or prepares in the morning for vigorous movement, he just can’t get them to work. wong, the man that lead stephen here, and the ancient one are patient, but he can tell there’s just something he’s not getting right. 

“focus,” the ancient one says and stephen has been here long enough that he snorts and flippantly says, “the longer i focus, the longer i don’t get it.”

“then _don’t_ focus! let your mind wander, let the world come to you.”

but if he doesn’t focus, the world slips in, and the world hates him. it makes his leg shake, makes his hands go unsteady, makes his mind think of memories that he’s tried hard to forget. he is scarred inside and out, and it will be a long while before the mind is healed. the mind, he doesn’t have to tell the ancient one, is much harder to get to heal then the body.

“do the others have to do this?” he asks one afternoon, standing at the edge of a cliff, holding his fingers in an aching position that wobble, just the slightest. he closes his eyes against the cold, and wishes he would learn temperature control from wong instead of whatever this was.

the ancient one’s voice is lulled and serene when she murmurs, “not the others. you’re learning so much more than them.”

at first, he doesn’t want to. his hands do not get better and the ancient one does not tell him how to _make_ them better. she shows him things he had never heard of before, seen things that make no sense, teaches him spellcasting like it’s the same as splinting an ankle. and stephen takes it all in, because he has learned long ago in school classrooms that if he did not get it, the others would degrade and punish him with crass sneers.

he learns, but the ancient one knows he does not know the same way she, and the others do.

“it is not in here,” she says one evening, his panting breath the only noise in the outside courtyard. he sits on the cobblestone floor, breaks in the brick springing up moss and weeds. as he catches his breath, he threads his shaky, shuddering fingers through the plants, thinking of home.

when she touches his head, he looks up, chest heaving. she says slowly, “you know it all in there, but that is not where it must be learned.”

“don’t tell me i need to use my heart.”

she smiles, faint. “show me the portal. just once more,” she amends when he winces, the exertion laying like thick cement on his bones. he had had another panic attack earlier that day, and his hands still quake, thinking of the rubber of the steering wheel under his skin, the vibrations of the after shocks, the burning crackle of sand against his ear.

but he collects his breath, recalls everything she had taught him, and puts his hands in the positions he’d forced them into since her first instruction. it is physically seamless, his body remembering something he forced his brain to remember, but there’s still something missing.

gold sparks erupt, crackling silently in the space between his fingers. he breathes in deep, slow and calm, before pulling his hands apart to widen the portal before him. in and out, he draws the portal wider and wider until the fields of his childhood home sparkle on the other side.

then the ancient one smacks him upside the head and the portal falls apart and he yelps, turning to stare confusedly at her while rubbing the back of his head.

her face is kind though. “what do you want to do with your hands, stephen?”

“use them,” he says weakly, clenching them against his thighs. but it hurts, aching, so he has to stretch them out again. he looks away from her when he clarifies, “i was a doctor. i _am_ a doctor. but i can’t help them the way i could before. no one wants a broken doctor to heal their broken child.”

“you are still a doctor, though you do not perform?”

“i guess,” he thinks softly, remembering the past year. he did a lot of moping, and not much medicine. there was the war, but it was somewhere else, not his anymore. he had his own fight, his own inner battles to endure. he was his own patient, and he was a terrible doctor to himself.

stephen glances at her. “i don’t know.”

“maybe you must figure that out first,” she says, tentative and kind. she stands, bracing herself on his shoulder as she does. he has learnt long ago that she was not weak, or bone-weary. she was aged, but she was not old. she bore the weight of magic on her shoulders like a sack of potatoes; no burden, but a delivery.

he watches her from the ground. “will i ever be able to use my hands?”

“you’ve always been able to use your hands, stephen,” she says, calm. her voice is like the wind, and he almost relishes in it, finding comfort in the way it reminds him of home. “now you must learn to perform.”

he almost laughs. though, it is some time later when the world cracks open, and something spits out, and stephen is the one to pick up the broken pieces, his hands steady as granite and steel. there is glitter, and blood, and stephen works fast to protect the people of the temple, fighting every urge to cry inside of him, and uses his hands instead.

maybe now he understands. it’s not his hands he cared about, but what he did with them. while he patches wounds and uses magic like a second nature, calling upon things he has learned and been taught, he looks upon the wreckage of the start of a war and understands what she means.

maybe he understands the look on his father’s face too, the one behind dark level eyes and a furrowed brow. maybe he understands now what his father had wanted to say, all those years ago. _fight, stephen, but do not perish. defend, stephen, but not at the expense of violence. stand up, stephen, even when it seems impossible to get back up_.

he isn’t sure whose idea it is for him to make the descent back down, away from the temple. the ancient one looks more ancient than she has in months, and wong tenderly shifts on his bruised hip, and stephen holds his hands at his sides, flexing the muscles and tendons and bones, revelling in purpose.

“the balance is broken, and must be repaired,” the ancient one says, voice echoing in the library, a place he has come to love, not loathe. “stephen, do your hands work?”

he thinks about saying no, just to stay. but he is different than he was a year ago, when his brokenness felt like a sentence he had to embrace. now, he thinks about his hands, and the gold in between, the feeling of renewed purpose in every breath he inhales. his hands work, but it was never his hands that were broken.

he looks at the ancient one, and still sees his mother, another woman hell-bent on unrelenting, on bearing a weight she herself carried in her palms, on enduring when others chose not to. he sees the ancient one as an equal, and wants to tell her in as many new ways he can.

but all he says, all she needs for now, is, “yes. my hands work.”

she smiles.

saving the world is not as easy as he predicted, but there is weight to it that he now understands. the world was small, and gigantic, and there was more to it that he did not understand, and in his own way, chose not to. the world was too big, but stephen wrapped his body around it, choosing to love it.

(stephen almost sees himself in kaecilius. someone who craved the urge to learn, who desired answers like it was something to hold inside, nurturing until it flourished. but stephen was satiated, grew content with each piece of information, and kaecilius wanted more, more, more—)

(it is stephen who whispers to dormannu, “what is it you’d like? maybe we can work together. maybe we can figure it out together.”)

stephen rings up wong from nebraska and wonders about the ancient one, and the weight on her shoulders. wong says she’s drinking water and going to bed earlier and tending to the garden stephen left behind. he says she’s proud of him.

donna is at home, with her daughter, shucking corn on the back porch, the breeze from the fields ghosting over her tanned skin. her daughter plays on the tire swing, pigtails flailing.

“does this mean you do magic tricks now?” she wonders, picking feathery corn strings off her knees. she glances at him, smirking. “do you do birthday parties?”

“no, he works at the circus,” victor says, passing by with a tray of sweet smelling grilled vegetables. inside, their mother barks at him to hurry, a tender love in her voice.

“i saved the whole world,” stephen blusters, blowing away stringy husks after donna throws them in his laughing face. “just like the old days, huh?”

she rolls her eyes, but she’s grinning over at her daughter, the little girl with their eyes. “you know, mom had a dream while you were away. she said she saw you surrounded by gold, but this time, your hands were gold too.”

“was it cash? because i’m short in that department—“

“no, it was magic,” she said, deadly serious, before bursting into laughter that brought her daughter dancing over, their giggles filling his lungs with fresh mountain air. he feels the weight of time tickle over his skin, but he ignores it, watching his family instead.

maybe to stephen, his hands work because of magic, and because of him. maybe he broke down on the side of a road because the wind was just the same as before. maybe his hands crumble and quake and every breath he takes is like vibrating coals, shaking sand in an explosion. maybe it hurts to be alive sometimes, and maybe he endures.

in the kitchen, his mother shoves a wooden spoon into his hand without a second glance and he watches her twist around the open kitchen, and wonders about her dreams. if magic was in her blood already, tickling her skin like time tickled his.

“ma, do you remember when i was born?”

she blinks back at him, narrowing her eyes as if it was hard to see him. she let out a soft noise, humming slightly. “yes, vividly.”

“do you remember what my name was supposed to be? what you and dad were going to name me?”

she straightens at the dining room table and he stirs the pot on the stove, suddenly sixteen and gangly and bloody-nosed, punishment for punching kids behind the school making dinner with his mom. this does not feel like punishment anymore. it feels like a lesson, wrapped in the smells of ginger and garlic.

maybe his mother was wiser than the ancient one. maybe to know the earth, to know young teenage boys, to stand unrelenting in the face of prejudice and discrimination was magic and power and strength enough. maybe the magic in his hands, gold and sparkly and otherworldly, was just another way of shoving a fist into the air and claiming dissent.

his mother, short and gray-haired and still callous-handed, looks across at him with a furrow between her brows and looks almost identical to his father’s face that he’s struck, remembering. he has learnt foreign, dead languages, learnt hand gestures that saved lives, stepped into worlds that were not supposed to exist. and that look on his mother’s face is still undecipherable.

“no,” she says, mandarin rich and soft to his ears. she steps around the table to press her roughened skin to his cheek. “my son . . . it does not matter. you are stephen.”

he searches her face, but finds only honesty. carefully, she says, “stephen wu, strange name for a strange man.”

he rolls his eyes and she pinches his ear. “make sure that doesn’t boil over, son.”

it is somewhere in his own reflection that stephen finds the truth. his hands ache, sometimes, remembering the thrum of fire. sometimes, he presses the stethoscope to a patient’s chest and hears faint whispers, ghostly thrums wrapped around a stuttering heartbeat, and starts in surprise. sometimes, stephen hears his name across the hospital and remembers that it is just a name. it’s what he does with it that matters more.

there is no mystic wisdom to his hands. just time and patience, and mountain air. his ex-colleague who suggested tibet will look at stephen’s hands and exclaim, wondering what his treatment was. and stephen will wiggle his fingers and moan ghostly, “magic.”

(somewhere, the ancient one listens to a voicemail on the machine that starts with, “i’m not sure if you get voicemail that high up,” and ends with “thank you. thank you for helping me help myself.”

and she’ll grin. she doesn’t feel that old, not that weighted, not in that moment.)

stephen doesn’t go back to the war, to any war, or any army. he has learned a lot, in classrooms and high mountain cliff tops, and worlds between worlds, and knows it’s okay to rest. that it’s okay to dip his hands into warm water and relax, letting time slip by.

when the world does shift, capsize a little in on itself, he’ll be ready to endure, to be unrelenting, to gently take the world’s face in his hands and whisper, “we’ll figure it out together, one step at a time.”

stephen wu never needed magic to be a hero, to defend the innocent and stand up for those who couldn’t do it themselves. his hands broke, shattered in on themselves, and stephen fractured a little too. and to heal, to learn to become the person he was before, all he needed was a reminder that magic was just a stepping stool.

he can reach the top shelf now, hands steady.


End file.
